How to Make Smart Decisions in Less Than 60 Seconds. Sometimes we face tough decisions that involve one or more unknowns.
We can’t know in advance what the consequences of each alternative will be. This is especially true of big decisions like quitting a job, entering or exiting a relationship, or moving to a new city. When faced with such a decision, what do you do? If you can’t figure out the consequences, can you do any better than guessing? Usually what people do in such situations is freeze. The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups. October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail.
After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly. Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem from this direction. If you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating.
Smatchy.